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Life After Purging: Dining Room

Since my big purge this summer, I have slowly been getting the house back in order to a more easy to use and less stuff feel to our home. I had to move a few items of decor around and really was just finding a new home for the stuff I kept. Things are not drastically different, but I saw my home with fresh eyes and with a little more empty space.

The fireplace mantel is one of my favorites. I gave this space special attention as I wanted the combination of colors to flow well as it is one of the first things you see when you enter our home. All existing art was fair game so I could come up with just the right balance.

I also moved our living room mirror into the dining room to create balance and scale in this little corner.

This was the first room that I really redecorated so I shopped the house to put it together. While I loved the new combination, it left a few of our other rooms bare. This lead to redecorating everything! But now that everything is settled and in it's place I am grateful I took the extra time to get things how I wanted them.

Our large gallery wall stayed the same but I focused the mantel decor on this color palette to create unity throughout the room and the house.

As for the organizational part, I realized that I was holding onto too much serving wear. While we use it plenty, it really was too much. So instead of keeping a bunch of cheaper serving pieces, I got myself to let go of some of it and make room to actually store our nicer dishes, leaving me more breathing room in the kitchen.

We have two large drinking containers that take up an awkward amount of space. My goal was to fit them into this part of the cabinet. It took a lot of Tetris like skill to get them to fit but after purging I finally had a place for them tucked away.

Things are still a little crowded but I am finally only keeping the things that get used on a consistent basis. All of these drawers now hold things we use every time we entertain. No more storing things that we maybe use once a year.

Now that everything has a specific place, I can immediately put things away when I am done with them. No more daily tidying. Just once in awhile cleaning. It is truly freeing.